Lordy, Mom! I'm only gonna go get an MRI; they're actin' like I'm already daid and burried. I guess Amos really IS in a hurry to inherit my collection of great art reproductions. I'll bet he's just jealous of my Mona Lisa On Black Velvet, that's what. Especially since she's holding a banana. He doesn't have one and he wants mine.

A "buance" is a ghost that inhabits the uplands of certain islands near Sumatra. It is said to be the spirit of a young girl or woman who died before she had ever eaten cassava and so spends eternity searching for cassava seeds. According to the locals, if you are confronted by a buance you simply have to point in some direction and the buance will go off that way on its eternal cassava search. The buance is not vindictive or nasty, just sort of lost. You can protect yourself against a buance by wearing a "titan arum" flower on your clothing or in your hair.

I think I must have mis-typed -- the b should have been an "n", spelling "nuances". In context this makes much more sense. After all, I am pretty sure there is no such word as "buances", or its putative singular, "buance". At least, as far as I know...

You're on the right track, Rapaire. I too have some rare and valuable stuff I am going to leave Amos. Namely, the lamp that looks like a lady's leg in fishnet stockings and the Singing, Dancing Santa Claus that sings "Jingle Bell Rock" and is automatically triggered to start doing so whenever anyone walks within 6 feet of it. Those are items I would not dream of leaving to anyone else but Amos. I know that he fully appreciates such things and will give them a place of pride in his mansion. Then too, there are 8500 back issues of Popular Mechanics here that need a good home....and a complete collection of (one each of) all the reptilian beanie babies ever issued.

Amos, you...you...know about...my art collection? About the sad-eyed clowns and the kids with big eyes and my collection of Elvises painted on black velvet which would be internationally famous if I could show it which I can't? About my complete collection of Harlequin Romances and Jacquelyn Susanne and Danielle Steel novels?

Well, if I croak on the surgery table I leave them all to you, Amos. Because I know that of all the MOABites, you and you alone would fully appreciate them. Only you have the wit and intelligence to fully understand their subtleties, the nuances which make them the art they are.

Fill in for Rapaire? Hell, I could do it with one hand tied behind my keyboard. I'll just start a second identity, just for Mom, and I'll argue myself blue in the facer. No problem, man, Mom will be just fine when you get back. Piece o' cake.

Mom, I'm seriously worried. I'm having this MRI on Wednesday and I may very well need knee surgery. If that's the case, I'm going to be down for a couple of days and I don't know WHO is going to look after you. I mean, who else can you depend upon?

When a granular material such as sand is mixed with a certain amount of liquid, the surface tension of the latter bestows considerable stiffness to the material, which enables, for example, sand castles to be sculpted1, 2, 3, 4. The geometry of the liquid interface within the granular pile is of extraordinary complexity and strongly varies with the liquid content5, 6, 7. Surprisingly, the mechanical properties of the pile are largely independent of the amount of liquid2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 over a wide range14, 15, 16. We resolve this puzzle with the help of X-ray microtomography, showing that the remarkable insensitivity of the mechanical properties to the liquid content is due to the particular organization of the liquid in the pile into open structures. For spherical grains, a simple geometric rule is established, which relates the macroscopic properties to the internal liquid morphologies. We present evidence that this concept is also valid for systems with non-spherical grains. Hence, our results provide new insight towards understanding the complex physics of a large variety of wet granular systems including land slides, as well as mixing and agglomeration problems.

I thought this might be important. Microtubular hydraulic nodes supporting variable-pressure open-strucutred liquid patterns could conceivably provide a breakthrough in construction of large configurable shelters or other supporting structures.

The MOABites ran like wolves to the fold, And their numbers were drooling and laughing, and old In the pale purple dawn, at the rise of the hill They stood in array, and they laughed soft and shrill. Their horses cavorted, their trumpets were gold And they sang out "BS"! in the damp and the cold.

Then each one to his stirrups, to each his épée And they swung to their saddles, and galloped toward day, With the screams of the dying rattling over the plain The MOABites struck, struck again, struck again. That was long long ago, as the elders recall, Who were there and who saw it, and remember it all.

It was cognitive madness, a mind's paroxysm Not one gal was sure what was hers, or was his'n. On that plain stands, today, just a cold granite marker, To remember the day when the MOAB went starker. In cool quiet letters, the stone doth profess: "On this hill, at one time, there was first-class BS."

YOu should go back to the fish picture and then meander through the collection by clicking on the PReviosu button. Awesome tour of the world's interesting coins and nuiches, the tiny places where beauty walks, untroubled by opinion and unafraid of capture.

Because I so loved the MOAB, I give them the latest and greatest mind-sharpening, time-wasting, rice-giving charitable diversion yet seen by man -- the amazing FreeRice. You will soon find yourself posing questions that never occurred to you before, such as "What use is a dilatory panjandrum?". Warning -- may actually detract from MOAB time.

"The universe is 13.73 billion years old, give or take 120 million years, astronomers said last week.

That age, based on precision measurements of the oldest light in the universe, agrees with results announced in 2006. Two additional years of data from a NASA satellite known as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe have narrowed the uncertainty by tens of millions of years.

ÒEverything is tightening up and giving us better and better precision all the time,Ó said Charles L. Bennett, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and the leader of the group analyzing the data. ÒItÕs actually significantly better than previous results. There is all kinds of richness in the data.Ó

About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough for protons and electrons to combine into hydrogen atoms. That released a burst of light, which over the billions of years since has cooled to a bath of microwaves pervading the cosmos.

Yet there are slight variations in the background, which the NASA satellite has been measuring since 2001. Those variations have given evidence supporting an idea known as cosmic inflation, a rapid expansion of the universe in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of its existence..."NYT